Aisles

Aisles 

By Claire CB Gochal

Kate needed bananas and Bran Flakes—she was determined to stick to her diet and lose the ten pounds circling her waist like an inflatable donut she’d gained in the weeks of lockdown-—but her Zoom meetings ran until supper, and she was still too terrified to bring her asthmatic toddler into the store with the Covid virus raging. 

The Instacart grocery shopping and delivery application was far improved from when she’d tried it years ago, pre-pandemic. The app prompted her to add her favorites, so she ordered chicken nuggets and yogurt for her daughter, and mahogany hair dye and a color-safe, curl enhancing shampoo for herself. And, toilet paper, on the off chance it was in stock. She paid the extra three dollars for priority shopping, and within a matter of minutes she had a notification on her phone that Paul D was about to shop her order. Paul D’s wide, rough-shaven face was off-center in the profile picture, clearly taken in the front seat of a car. She wondered if he’d taken the job and set up the account in haste when the pandemic hit. She’d read about people who had done that. She hated being that person, just reading about other people in tough situations, while hers remained worrying but not upended.  She could afford to shop for groceries online and stockpile, she was able to hold onto her job and work remotely. Though it was hard balancing her child and work, her daughter wasn’t old enough yet for school, so they bypassed suffering fundamental education through a computer screen. There was a quotation making the internet rounds about everyone being in the same storm, but not having the same boats.

Kate returned to her spreadsheet. Within a few minutes, her phone vibrated. 

“Hey, I’ll be doing your shopping today. Let me know if you need to add anything!” Paul D wrote.

“Thanks so much!” she typed back. Paul D’s professionalism and cheerfulness were a refreshing break from the grind of sitting in front of the computer in her sweatpants. 

Her groceries essentially off her to do list, Kate got up from her desk to stretch and check on her daughter, Nora, napping in her crib in her room down the hall. Nora wheezed every few breaths. Kate ran over her list of precautions like rubbing a worry doll in her mind: they hadn’t been anywhere or seen anyone to risk exposure to the virus. She’d kept her mail outside; she’d washed her groceries. She calmed down as Nora’s breath remained even.

In her office, the phone pinged again, the little carrot icon next to a trailing message. “Sorry, they don’t have your item.” The shopper had sent a photograph with another message: “Is this OK? My daughters love these ones.” 

In the picture, long nails painted pink circled a plastic tube of yogurt with farm animals on it. Kate could hear her own daughter stirring down the hall, knocking fingers across the bars of her crib. The ongoing supply chain issues and resultant shortages depressed Kate, and she appreciated the shopper’s effort to find a suitable replacement. It was personal, and comforting. Combined with the mention of the daughters, a warmth and robustness filled out the identity of this nameless, faceless person running her errands. Not that Kate forgot there was a real person on the other end of the transcript, but almost. The isolation of quarantine distorted all adult interaction.

Kate started to type, then looked at the picture again. The contrast of the burly man’s profile picture in the chat profile against the slender hands in the texted photo was amusing, and Kate connected to those fingers, typing and shopping. “Yogurt is great. Thank you. Also…your hands don’t look like they belong to a Paul D,” she typed.

“😂 Can you keep a secret? 😉” Paul D typed.

“Sure. 😆” Kate messaged.  

“I have multiple accounts. I get a lot done.” 😂

“I get it,” Kate said. Then she added, “Thanks for going in there. It’s brave.”

The shopper typed for some time, the dots appearing and disappearing. Finally, “Thank you. That means a lot. It’s been tough.”

Kate’s heart tightened. “You’re doing a great job.”

 “❤️ I actually think someone is following me, since I’m finding all the good stuff.”

“😂, maybe.” Kate typed.

“seriously though…kinda weird that he--,” the message ended abruptly.

Kate’s first reaction was fear, her heart galloping.  She started to type back and ask for a description of who was following her, then stopped herself. All the confinement was making Kate insane. This woman wasn’t getting followed. And if she were, it was certainly someone looking for a lead on the hard-to-find items. She set the phone down again and joined her work call. She could hear Nora babbling to herself. She’d do this for a few minutes, then begin to cry if Kate didn’t retrieve her.

 Kate’s cellphone buzzed with a message, and she was admittedly relieved to see the profile of Paul D on the screen. She should’ve asked her name, but now it was too late and awkward.

“I found toilet paper! Last ones!” 

“OMG that’s amazing.” Kate was growing increasingly fond of not-Paul D and her incredible competence. 

Kate wrote, “You must really be getting followed now.”

“hah, should be done soon anyway”

It was kind of a weird message. The “anyway” part. She was overthinking, she knew she was. Nora would demand to get up soon. Kate had to finish her work.

She glanced at her phone over the next several minutes, expecting notification the order was complete. The shopper was quiet in the chat and Kate thought she must’ve checked out. But her phone showed the job was still in progress.

“All set?” Kate typed to Paul D, she couldn’t help herself. She now worried the woman was going to take her groceries, that her friendly banter had all been a con.

Kate held her breath and only exhaled when the chat lit up with a message.

“Sry did know, Kinda weird…But sry not ur prob.”

The sudden shift in text quality alarmed Kate, but she told herself again it was the strain of the virus, and the woman was probably just rushing to finish up another shop. Or another Not Paul-D had taken over. 

But altogether it unsettled her.

Kate responded, “Even with a mask you recognized him?”

A few dots of typing. “No/mask”

“Ugh”

Kate’s fingers froze above her phone. Why did she type that? For all she knows this shopper wasn’t wearing one either. There was no reason to start an argument. But the shopper wrote back, “scare”

Kate studied the message several times. Was she saying it was scary the person wasn’t wearing a mask? Or that she was scared of the person? A deep unease settled in her belly. Nora was still playing in her crib but had begun to call “Mama?” every few minutes. Kate returned to her work meeting but continued to glance down at her phone. She Maybe Kate was more of a sucker than she ever imagined. She closed and reopened the Instacart app in case it was a bug on her end, but shopping progress remained stalled. Not-Paul probably lost internet connection and the app wasn’t updating that she’d checked out.  She didn’t imagine the app was designed to support one person using multiple profiles. 

There was a very long pause. Then her phone pinged. “help”

Kate dumped her headphones beside her computer with her call still in progress. She’d hired this other mother to do what she, Kate, was too afraid to do, and put her in jeopardy, possibly twice over.

She plucked Nora from her crib and over her little face, she pulled on a cloth mask her neighbor had sewn. Then she put one on her own. She hadn’t bought any of the disposable ones. They hadn’t needed them and she didn’t want to take away supply from the front line workers. The one time they’d been to the doctor’s office, they’d used the disposable masks they offered. 

She buckled Nora in her car seat and paused. The groceries would probably arrive before she even got home. She began to unclip her then stopped. We will just run in, just take a quick look.

On the ride over, the roads were empty, and Kate realized she didn’t know who she was looking for, if she’d even still be in the store. 

Kate tucked Nora into her carrier against her chest and hoped this would be brief. Instacart had an option to call your shopper from the app, blinding both phone numbers. Kate tried several times in the car, but the call kept getting rejected. She tried inside the store, hoping to hear the phone ring, but the immediate silencing made it impossible, unless she were standing near enough to someone to see them do it.

Kate found the store manager behind the information counter, wearing a shower cap and mask covering most of her face. 

“Have you seen someone shopping an order in any kind of distress?”

“No,” the woman said, wary behind her glasses.

“I don’t know what happened to my Instacart shopper. She stopped shopping.”

Kate held out her phone without looking.

“It’s fine. See,” the manager said from behind her mask with bananas and oranges on it, pointing at, but not touching, Kate’s screen.

Kate pulled her phone back. The app showed Paul D had completed her task.

Kate’s panic briefly subsided but roared back after re-reading the “help” messages. 

She chased the store manager down. “I didn’t get the groceries.” 

“Maybe you just missed them on the way over here.”

It was theoretically possible, but Kate passed no one on the roads.

“You need to take it up with Instacart. It happens sometimes.” The manager lifted her hands. The shower cap looked ridiculous. This was all ridiculous.

Kate canvassed the aisles she knew the woman would’ve shopped, based on her own familiarity with the location of the same groceries she no longer shopped for herself in person. 

In aisle 12, she found a shopping cart with neatly bagged shampoo and hair dye, bran flakes, and tubes of yogurt. Her groceries. How odd to see them abandoned, like she herself was violated. Someone had taken the toilet paper. God, is that why she needed help? Did someone ambusb her for the toilet paper? It was possible. The world had gone off its axis.

She tucked Nora closer against her chest. How unnecessary it was for her to be in this store, taking these risks for a woman she didn’t even know. But then that kernel of guilt popped. She was the reason this woman was here, potentially attacked.

The woman’s phone was not in the cart. Kate suddenly remembered Instacart began to track the driver once they had checked out. In the app, a wobbly blue dot indicated the location of the shopper, and it appeared she was still in the parking lot and unmoving.  

Kate hurried out of the store, pushing the cart with her groceries. The app wasn’t precise, and the parking lot was large, but Kate was able to narrow down the pulsing blue dot to a few rows of scattered cars in the center of the lot.

She called Paul D again, listening for a phone ringing inside the cars. This was madness. What was she going to do once she found her? What if whoever hurt her came after Kate and her child?

A set of pink nails rested on the open window of a minivan. They belonged to a woman Kate’s age with long platinum hair growing out at the roots who’d clearly been crying and was out of breath.

“Paul D?” Kate said. 

The woman looked up. The lower part of her face was concealed by a fraying mask, and circles darkened the hollow below her eyes. 

“Are you OK?” Kate asked. “I’m Kate. You had my groceries,” she gestured to the cart.

The woman’s eyes widened. “Yes, I’m so sorry. My old boss was in there, and I had to get away from him. I was going to go back for your items, I swear. I just needed to get out, and away.”  She got out of the car. “I didn’t have anyone else to tell where I was. I can’t believe you came here to find me.” She began to cry again. Nora reached her little hand out to her.

From across the parking lot an engine revved and then accelerated, the sound getting closer and louder. A silver sedan barreled at them, and she thought she was hallucinating. She dove with Nora and pushed Not-Paul out of the way before the car swerved away from them and into the cart of groceries. The car reversed and Kate screamed, and she made eye contact with the man in the car. He stopped with a skid, inches from them. A small crowd gathered around the small heap of females on the ground.

Kate checked her daughter, who was completely unfazed, and helped her shopper stand.

The driver unfurled himself from the car.  He was a tall, slim white man wearing a white dress shirt and jeans and without a mask. “I just lost control of my car there,” he said, running a hand through his sandy hair in unconvincing disbelief. Kate would’ve been more inclined to believe him if he said an alien confiscated the steering wheel.

“You were trying to hit me,” not Paul-D said. 

“You quit on me,” he said, fury mottling his face.

“I was the nanny for his kids until the virus,” she said to Kate, like she couldn’t speak directly to her old boss. “He said I couldn’t wear a mask in the house. I wasn’t going to put my family under that risk.”

“Look at the risk you’re taking now,” he said, gesturing to the store. “You’re going into a store to do someone else’s bidding.”

A masked man stepped between them, and said, “Whoa buddy.” and sirens wailed in the distance.

“How did you know this was what I was doing?” the shopper asked.

He shrugged. “I followed you.”

A few people in the crowd, but not all, gasped. A few even nodded. He looked around, as if taking stock of his allies and enemies. “What? It’s a free country. I needed to know what was so much less risky, in your mind, you’d leave me so completely screwed.”

The police whipped into the parking lot, lights spinning. “Oh Christ,” not Paul D said.

Kate didn’t understand what she had to worry about, she had done nothing wrong. She bounced Nora gently and couldn’t stop wondering when she could get her groceries in the cart that had spun out across the lot and go home.